CD Projekt Red has offered some insight as to why it has decided to use Unreal Engine 5 for its upcoming new Witcher saga game, rather than its in-house REDengine 4.
Talking as part of the recent The State of Unreal stream, CDPR’s CTO Paweł Zawodny said “It was the shift towards open world support that brought Unreal Engine 5 to our attention.”
“This opens a new chapter for us where we really want to see how our experience in building open-world games gets combined with all the engineering power of Epic,” he said. He went on to explain that CD Projekt Red and Epic will work together on engine features in order to “achieve something extraordinary in the end.”
CD Projekt Red’s Art Director, Jakub Knapik, noted that thanks to Epic’s collaboration with many other studios there are already many desirable features in Unreal Engine 5. “The fact that Unreal is used by a lot of teams already in the world, a lot of perspectives are projected into the design of the tools and that helps the tool to be way more agile.” As such, CDPR will benefit from the ideas of other Unreal users.
Game Director Jason Slama also noted that open world games require a really solid engine due to the amount of variables and moving parts these type of games have, suggesting that Unreal Engine 5 can offer a very desirable level of stability.
“One of the things that is really important to keep in mind when talking about open-world games versus, let’s say, linear games is the possibilities of the things that can go wrong or the scenarios that you have to consider are exponentially higher than linear games,” he said. “Players can go in whatever direction they want, they can handle content in any order that they want theoretically, and to really encapsulate that means that you need a really stable environment where you can be able to make changes with a high level of confidence that it’s not going to break in 1,600 other places down the line.”
For more from CDPR, see how Slama has vowed to avoid crunch during the development of The Witcher 4, and that the new game will feature a new Witcher school.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.
